


Quiet Lines

by JJGrace42



Series: Scrapbook of a Dimension-Traveling Sideshow [6]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 17:55:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11257968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JJGrace42/pseuds/JJGrace42
Summary: And instead of red thread it was black lines, inked onto skin, that tied soulmates to each other.





	Quiet Lines

**Author's Note:**

> Author Note: This is a soulmate AU where any marks you put on your own skin show up on your soulmate’s body as well. This will continue eventually (someday), but for now it stands decently enough on its own. This was an idea I had last night and I ran with it. So please enjoy, read, and review!
> 
> DISCLAIMER: Really? We’re still having to clarify that Naruto isn’t mine?

The funny thing was that Sophie had been a doodler. Back Before, she’d always had a pen in hand with ink scrawled habitually across her skin. The black—because she had other pens, but none of then had ever looked quite so right against her own pale tones—was an escape, of sorts. The stresses of day-to-day life always seemed to melt away as the pen’s tip massaged its way across her arms and legs, leaving behind patterns and poems and whispers of who she was.

Mirai was also a doodler.

She was almost two by the time she managed to get her hands on a pen in this world and she was pretty sure Neko had a heart attack when she found the toddler sitting in the middle of her room with flowers and abstract memories of a world gone by curling around her wrists and across her tiny arms and stomach and stretching down to her toes. The woman had let out a horrified shriek and then promptly whisked Mirai away to the bathroom to scrub the ink off.

It didn’t do much good because there were new masterpieces adorning the redhead’s skin just a day later.

It went on like that for two more years and Mirai had long since lost count of just how many pens had mysteriously disappeared from the Matron’s office whenever the woman was distracted. But then the time came when it ended, as all things had to.

It had been a normal day, as far as normal ever got for a reincarnated jinchuuriki. They were sitting under the sakura tree in the front yard like a tiny, broken family. Lee was babbling about learning to read. Naruto had taken one of his sister’s hands in his and was tracing the inky art staining her skin. And Tenten couldn’t stop staring.

“Are you trying to talk to him?”

Lee jerked his head to the side to stare at the brunette, jaw clicking shut in surprise at being interrupted for once. Naruto’s fingers paused on Mirai’s skin. And it took the redhead a moment to realize that she was the one Tenten was addressing. “Talk to . . . whom?” She cocked her head to the side.

The other girl waved wildly at Mirai’s arms, marked so heavily and so stained with grey that it was hard to see any real skin. “If you’re trying to talk to your soulmate, wouldn’t words be better than pictures?”

Mirai couldn’t help the giggle that bubbled at the back of her throat. They had fairy tales here too, it seemed. “Soulmate?” she asked, a grin stretching the Kyuubi marks on her face. “Don’t be ridiculous, Tenten. What are you talking about?”

Tenten frowned, but it was Lee’s reaction that really knocked her off-balance. “It’s not ridiculous, Mirai-chan!” he gasped, almost as if he was appalled. “Daiki laughed at soulmates too, but the Matron told us all about it! They’re real!”

“I promise!” Tenten rushed to say, seeing the doubt curling across her friend’s face. “They’re real and you share what you put on your skin.”

Then amused suspicion washed away to pure, unadulterated horror. “Wh-what?” she rasped. And then she yanked her stained arm away from Naruto like it would burn him if he touched it any longer. “You mean that all of . . . this,” —she waved her ink marred hand at them— “is showing up on . . . someone else?”

“Your soulmate,” Tenten said in a matter-of-fact tone with all the tactfulness of a five-year-old. She seemed completely oblivious to the fact that she had just ripped apart any taste of security Mirai had ever felt.

The redhead shot to her feet, already turning towards the building with her lungs in her throat and her shallow breaths coiled around her spine. She took her first few fumbling steps before the panic grew heavier against her neck and she whipped around, holding out an inky hand. Naruto’s blue eyes stared at her before he nodded slowly and slid a clean, unblemished hand into hers. And then she jerked forward in a run, her heart twisting at the way her brother yelped and whimpered something about his arm hurting. But she couldn’t stop. She didn’t stop. She kept running and running until they reached their room and then she couldn’t run anymore because the entire world had given out from under her feet.

Naruto stumbled forward and she slammed the door, falling backwards against it and barely registering the thump jolting up her spine as she hit the floor. The first sob pushed venomously against her lips but she refused to open her mouth and refused to make a sound. She swallowed back the cry that had been filing away at her teeth and took a deep breath.

Her drawings of her old world and her old life and her own emotions were laid out so vividly through just a simple pen in order to help her make sense of the Void inside her head. And all of them had been appearing on someone else. She felt violated, as if someone had taken the darkest and deepest secrets of her soul and read them aloud.

“R-rai?”

She vaguely remembered once Before when she’d tried origami. And oh man, had she been bad at it. Her fingers were too rough and her grip was too strong and she would make delicate flowers and swans only to have the brittle paper rip and snap between her hands.

She hated that her brother’s voice reminded her of that paper.

Violet found cerulean and a gasp fell from between her lips. “Nato,” she breathed. And then her gaze dropped to his arm—and to the red imprint of her fingers around his hand. “Oh, I— Nato, I’m sorry,” she whimpered, crawling forward on her hands and knees and then dragging him into her arms. She cradled him close. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

He sniffled, curling contentedly against her chest. “It’s okay. Do your drawings really scare you that much?”

She didn’t answer, feeling tension settling into her jawline and staring at the ink across her skin. She scrubbed herself raw in the bath that night to get all of it off. Mirai refused to say a word to Naruto about how all the pens in the room had suddenly disappeared or how sometimes she washed her hands until they bled. But she didn’t doodle; she wouldn’t anymore.

It was a month later when she found ink on her skin again.

_Why’d you stop?_

The three words were faded, as if they’d been rubbed over and over until they were faint, and they almost blended with her tanned skin. But they were impossible to ignore, curling across the soft flesh of her inner wrist and staring at her when she woke up. It took everything in her power to swallow her scream.

And if Naruto woke up to find her standing in the bathroom with puffy eyes and the skin on her forearm rubbed raw, then she would simply make him promise to never talk about it.


End file.
